Agile Application Integration

A Revolutionary Approach

White Paper

Contents Application Integration for Today’s Challenges .......................................................................... 3

Protecting Your Business Investment in Applications and Data ................................................. 4

Cloud Adoption Demands Agility ............................................................................................. 4

Agile Application Integration—Essential for Business Innovation .......................................... 4

Agile Integration for All of Your Applications.............................................................................. 5

Traditional Data Integration Falls Short .................................................................................. 5

Agile Integration for Data, Applications, and Business Processes .......................................... 5

The Kapow Katalyst Application Integration Platform—Built For Agility ................................... 6

How Agile Integration Works .................................................................................................. 6

Enterprise-class Integration with IT ......................................................................................... 6

A Complete Agile Integration Solution: Kapow Katalyst ......................................................... 6

Kapow Software at Work ............................................................................................................ 7

Opening a New Market and Enhancing Customer Service...................................................... 7

Application Mobilization of Cloud, SaaS, and On-premise Applications ................................. 7

Agile Application Integration for Improved Productivity ........................................................ 8

Kapow Katalyst: Agile Integration for Any Organization ............................................................ 8

INTEGRATION CUTS LABOR COST 88%

As the U.S. Transportation Security

Administration began to adopt OMB’s hosted

LoB HR SaaS solution, they faced a daunting

challenge: how to link their legacy, custom

EmpowerHR application to their new, hosted

PeopleSoft instance.

The projected cost of creating an API for the

legacy EmpowerHR application was prohibitive,

so TSA initially tried a manual, cut-and-paste

approach—but that proved to be unworkable.

By turning to Kapow Katalyst for secure, real-

time application integration, TSA improved

employee services while cutting related labor

costs by 88%.

Application Integration for Today’s Challenges

Traditional data integration techniques were architected for yesterday’s batch processing world, but IT

has moved beyond to embrace cloud computing.

In Gartner’s 2009 CIO survey, cloud computing ranked #16 as a business priority—but in just one year it

jumped 14 spots up the priority list to #2. “Gartner predicts that within two years 80% of Fortune 1000

enterprises will use the cloud at some level.”1 For many companies, cloud use will be at significant

levels: Gartner has estimated that 30-35% of the IT workload would move to the cloud over the next five

years, but the actual rate is outpacing that estimate.2

Government interest in cloud computing ramped up

in September 2009 when the U.S. Federal CIO

launched the Federal Government’s Cloud

Computing Initiative. The U.S. Government is the

world’s biggest IT buyer, spending over $76 billion

annually on more than 1,100 data centers, 10,000

systems, 24,000 web sites, and 272,000 data sets on

data.gov alone (up from just 47 data sets in the prior

year). Clearly, there’s gravitational pull to the U.S.

initiative, which will accelerate the general move to

the cloud.

Cloud computing encompasses a wide range of

concepts including private, public, hybrid, and

federated clouds, along with various types of cloud

services including IaaS (infrastructure as a service),

PaaS (platform as a service), and SaaS (software as a

service).

Each of these environments offers different benefits

and different integration challenges—and the

traditional data integration platforms don’t measure

up to the needs of cloud computing.

1 “Analyst Q&A with Conference Chair Mike Chuba,” http://www.gartner.com/technology/summits/na/data-

center/analyst-qa.jsp 2 Sreedhar Kajeepeta, “Cloud Computing Adoption Rate Speeding Along,” April 27, 2010,

http://www.trustedcloudservices.com/cloud-computing-adoption-rate-speeding-along

Figure 1. Your applications live in an increasingly complex, hybrid world

Protecting Your Business Investment in Applications and Data

Expanding your IT portfolio to include cloud-based assets exposes several questions that cloud and SaaS

vendors may be unable to answer. For example, just how do you change service providers, or migrate to

a new SaaS application? Will there be “drift” between your on-premises and cloud applications because

of barriers to integration? Will you lose control of your cloud applications because you no longer control

the databases behind them?

Cloud Adoption Demands Agility

You need to maintain control of your business systems, but the challenges involved multiply in a hybrid

world of private and public clouds. Your applications can live both on-premises and in the cloud, and

possibly in multiple clouds.

Some of this complexity is

shown in Figure 1, but that

tells only part of the

complexity story.

When your applications

are spread across multiple

environments, your

business-critical data also

becomes dispersed around

the web, scattered across

extranets, intranets, and

multiple websites, and

locked into Excel, PDF,

Word, and XML. Will you be

able to maintain control of all this disaggregated data and ensure it stays integrated with your business

systems, in real-time? Will you actually be able to change direction as conditions change, and take

advantage of capabilities offered by another SaaS vendor—or migrate all of your data back to an internal

system?

The need for agile application integration is clear.

Agile Application Integration—Essential for Business Innovation

Mere data integration is not enough, because cloud computing poses a greater challenge—the challenge

to innovate new business processes. Because even though cloud computing promises new agility to

organizations, it can reduce flexibility in these very same organizations. Your business processes can

become just as fragmented as the data and applications become as they move from on-premise to the

cloud, or from one SaaS provider to another. And this may be the most serious challenge of all because

you’re at the mercy of your customers, partners, and suppliers—forces you cannot control.

Only agile application integration will let you innovate the new business processes you will need.

Agile Integration for All of Your Applications

Traditional Data Integration Falls Short

Traditional data integration products recognize only two ways to integrate disparate IT systems:

At the back-end data layer, using data integration. You can reverse-engineer the database and the business logic that ties the data together—or hire an army of consultants to do it for you. Either way, it’s extremely time-consuming and costly—and simply not a viable solution in view of the number of integrations needed in a distributed, hybrid world. This approach is unavailable for SaaS applications—or for applications owned by your customers, partners, and suppliers—because direct access to external databases is seldom permitted.

At the application logic layer, using an application program interface (API). Although promising at first, only a tiny fraction of the applications you need to integrate offer APIs. Of more than 132 million websites3, for example, only about 3700 have published APIs4. For most of these sites—customer sites, B2B web applications, partner applications—integration that relies on APIs is impossible. Even when available an API may not be ideal. When SaaS vendors want to create customer “stickiness” the API may not make it easy for you to pack up and leave. And some vendors are able to generate demand for professional services based on the complexity of their API. Case in point: One SaaS vendor offered to handle migrations on a consulting basis—for over $40,000 each—offsetting years of SaaS benefits.

Agile Integration for Data, Applications, and Business Processes

Agile integration supports both traditional methods—data integration and application integration—but provides agility those techniques cannot by providing a third way to integrate:

At the presentation layer. Those 132 million active web sites include the B2B web applications that your partners, suppliers, and customers require your staff to access, as well as the 24,000 U.S. Federal sites we mentioned, and thousands of sites containing data you can use to improve your decision-making—whether owned by partners or competitors. API-based tools find it impossible to access these applications—but this is where real business process innovation is taking place. It also includes sites inside your firewall—your HR systems, CRM apps, sales data, partner price lists, supplier inventory, and so on—that may not have APIs available

3 http://www.domaintools.com/internet-statistics/

4 http://www.programmableweb.com/

40 WEBSITES INTEGRATED IN 5 DAYS

For its ambitious HD.gov project, the U.S.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric

Administration (NOAA) needed to unify

information from over 100 NGOs, Federal

agencies, and universities.

NOAA found it impossible to connect all of

these systems into a central site—before

they turned to Kapow Katalyst.

In just 5 days, Katalyst was able to

integrate 40 new sites into the HD.gov site.

The Kapow Katalyst Application Integration Platform—Built For Agility

The Kapow Katalyst™ Application Integration Platform is designed to enable rapid integration of any

application, whether it’s located in the cloud, on a mobile device, or inside your firewall. It eliminates

the requirement for APIs by controlling the application’s user interface—which means that you can

integrate the business processes that are behind the websites you access. Kapow Katalyst also accesses

databases, files, spreadsheets, PDF and Word documents, XML and JSON—and many more data

formats, letting you create serious business integrations built for enterprise-class use.

How Agile Integration Works

Even though a web page may look unstructured, your web

browser displays only the part intended for people to see.

The browser itself processes a complex structure called the

DOM (for Document Object Model) and full understanding

of the DOM is essential for a browser to work properly.

Katalyst has the same deep understanding of the DOM that

a web browser does—but unlike a web browser, Katalyst

can rapidly learn how to automate a series of events. These

events, such as clicking on a button, entering login

credentials, or copying data from a web page, are the same

actions a human user would carry out when using the

application. These automated events can be combined with

database access, Web service invocation, or other activities

to create powerful integrations that cannot be

accomplished any other way.

Enterprise-class Integration with IT

As an enterprise-class product, the Katalyst platform can

run any integration on a regular schedule, or on demand. Kapow Katalyst fits smoothly into any IT

architecture because any integration can be transformed into a REST or SOAP API with a single click and

made available for others to use—or if you prefer .NET or Java, automatically generated APIs are

available to simplify access. Using these capabilities you can create automated business processes that

span your entire value chain—by directly linking cloud, SaaS and on-premise applications via their web

front-ends. Katalyst’s deep understanding of the DOM makes it resilient to changes in web page format.

A Complete Agile Integration Solution: Kapow Katalyst

Kapow Katalyst lets you choose whether to Integrate at the database layer, the application layer, or the

presentation layer—and you can access all layers in a single integration. The Katalyst Application

Integration Platform includes the Design Studio, a complete development environment that provides

point-and-click access to any website when building integrations.

Clusters of Roboservers form our execution

engine, which provides linear scalability for

integrations and APIs. Finally, our web-based

Management Console provides collaborative

administration, monitoring, and management of

the Katalyst environment.

Kapow Katalyst is the kind of complete application

integration platform that modern organizations

need. It enables you to integrate any applications

you choose and databases you can access. It

supports rapid development of integrations, which

can be managed with its integrated Management

Console—or with any management tool your IT

environment supports. It lets your business create

innovative new products and services, and gives IT

the confidence to deliver them in record time—bringing benefits that range from top-line growth to

increased efficiency, improving productivity and profitability.

Kapow Software at Work

Opening a New Market and Enhancing Customer Service

One customer, a manufacturer of auto parts, created a new service product by directly accessing their

client’s applications in real time and extracting their own orders with Kapow Katalyst. They capture tens

of thousands of orders annually, increasing market share in a segment they could not address any other

way. By providing this valuable service in a way their competitors cannot, they improve their

competitive position and make themselves more valuable to their clients.

Because each client’s applications behave differently—with different security needs, different

navigation, and different screen layouts, the agility that Kapow Katalyst provides is essential to their

success. They can create new integrations in a few days—often less—and implement them with

confidence.

Application Mobilization of Cloud, SaaS, and On-premise Applications

Mobile applications fall completely outside of the realm of standard integration methods, but Kapow

Katalyst is widely used to mobilize existing applications without needing to refactor or rewrite them. Our

customers deliver results in days or weeks—or hours, as IBM and Kapow Software did when we

developed a fully functional mobile conference scheduler in 3 hours. In

another example Commerzbank, Germany’s second-largest bank, created a

mobile version of its production B2C web application in 3 months—including

the creation of features that targeted mobile users only. Audi uses Kapow

Katalyst to deliver real-time data to the dashboard of its new flagship automobile, the A8. All of these

organizations rely on Kapow Katalyst to support them with mission-critical performance and reliability.

Figure 2. Katalyst Application Integration Platform

Agile Application Integration for Improved Productivity

Even before cloud computing was popular Katalyst’s tremendous productivity was delivering rapid time-

to-value: “Audi’s product managers used to check each of the 20 [data] sources individually and copy

the results into spreadsheets. While the task was time consuming and inconvenient, Audi’s information-

technology department didn’t want to pay as much as $500,000 to combine all of the data into one

application using traditional software-integration techniques…. [But with Katalyst] one developer was

able to build the new application in just four days for a fraction of that cost.”5

Kapow Katalyst: Agile Integration for Any Organization

Kapow Software enables any organization, large or small, to improve its agility—whether that means

radically improving customer service, delivering dramatically reduced costs, or enhancing productivity.

Remember that data migration challenge mentioned earlier? The one that required over $40,000 in

consulting fees?

Katalyst completed that migration in a single weekend.

Contact Kapow Software today to learn how we can help you integrate all of your applications—and

data—in the cloud or on-premise.

As the leading innovator in cloud application integration, Salesforce AppExchange™-certified Kapow Software rapidly

integrates, synchronizes, and migrates any data and application inside the enterprise, in the cloud, or on the Internet without

dependency on existing APIs. Kapow Software empowers the line of business to streamline business processes and integrate

applications, resulting in real-time business value. More than 500 customers, including Audi, Commerzbank, Intel, NetApp, and

dozens of federal agencies, rely on Kapow Software for process automation, mobile enablement, cloud and web application

integration, content migration, business intelligence, terrorism tracking, and comparison pricing, among other critical solutions.

5 The Wall Street Journal, July 31, 2007.

Kapow Software

260 Sheridan Ave, Suite 420 Palo Alto, CA 94306 Phone: +1 800 805 0828

Email: Sales@kapowsoftware.com Website: www.KapowSoftware.com Blog: www.KapowSoftware.com/blog